I think you're missing the point of the ritual purity laws. It wasn't to make the Israelite people more healthy because they were unenlightened rubes who didn't know any better, it was to make them distinct from the cultures around them; as some Biblical translations put it, they were to be God's "peculiar treasure" (Exodus 19:5). There's also the possibility that certain laws were simply codifying what was already a common practice (do you really think the Israelites were in the habit of taking a dump in their dining rooms?). Yes, there may have been some practical benefit to the laws, but that wasn't their primary purpose, and I think your "Ancient people were too stupid for their own good" interpretation falls apart when we consider some other Old Testament laws such as prohibitions against eating pork, planting two kinds of seed in the same field, or wearing blended fabrics, so these passages really don't support your argument in favor of special revelation to the hopelessly ignorant.brent wrote:People in the OT knew and knew of God differently than we know him. Their perception of God is different than ours. God revealed himself directly and indirectly in different ways than he does now. God isn't sending angels to wrestle with people, pull their hips out of their sockets, rain fire and brimstone, flood the planet, drop hole cities under ground, turn people to salt, swallow disobedient televangelists in big fish, have a mercy seat here, etc.Mountain Man wrote:This is essentially saying that nobody was capable of truly understanding the scripture until we came along with our "superior" knowledge and culture, and I refuse to believe that for a moment. We need to understand the Bible from the perspective of the cultural context within which it was written, and it is a gross error to try to reshape it to fit our cultural sensibilities.
The people in Leviticus needed to know how to wash their hands, poop away from their food, build houses for protection, etc. Much of the OT was written to people who weren't as educated and enlightened as we are today. What did the people before the book of Leviticus was written do? They died, pooped where they ate, and did all kinds of things that cut their lives short and sinned against God. So, your rationale does not work. It assumes that everyone had to know everything from the get go and that is not reality.
There are things in the bible hidden from us because it is not "time" for them to be revealed to us. There are things we think we know, that we are going to learn we were just wrong about. The same goes for people in the OT and NT. Only a relative few had a full revelation of God and the things to come. Until those people like Paul and John had those things revealed, the OT people did not have them and could not appreciate them. It was not their time. So....if God gave Paul and John things no man had ever known or seen until that time, what do you do with that?
I don't believe there is anything "hidden" in the Bible that is presently unknowable, and I would be curious to know your Biblical basis for believing so. Yes, God did reveal certain things to people in the past (whether they were truly unknowable before or God simply prompted them to see what was already right in front of them is, I suppose, a matter for debate), but those revelations became scripture and are no longer hidden. It would take a very compelling argument grounded in scripture to convince me that special revelation is a continuing phenomenon today and should be treated with the same authority as scripture itself. Frankly, it sounds suspiciously like trusting the "burning in your bosom" which is no more theologically valid than reading tea leaves.
